Anecdotal evidence from affiliates suggests that the FB Ad review team are working doubly hard to slap down new ad campaigns in response to user complaints. In particular a common refrain is that new campaigns which are similar to existing campaigns are being rejected.

Till now, the Facebook social network has been an overall pleasant user experience for most users, especially if they’ve come over from the social spamming barrage common on MySpace.

Aside from being hit with 100 friend add requests from strangers and another 500 application invites, Facebook is a manageable social platform, especially since their moderation filters block out users who sent out a large volume of private messages and the number of friend add requests are capped each day. (Although it’s common to see innocents get caught in the crossfire).

So it was a pretty rare occurrence to see this on a friend’s wall (the defacto “bulletin board” for facebook users to send and receive public messages).

Given that most accounts have to go through some level of verification and you have to manually add friends (who then can post messages on your wall), I was curious to see what the message was about.

Last month I spoke at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage (organized by Entrepreneur 27 Singapore (e27) and the Singapore PHP Users Group) for a session: “Facebook Apps: Goldmine or Hype?”

It was certainly an interesting session, and if you know me, I certainly wouldn’t waste my time if it was “hype”…

More interestingly, I got a chance to meet up with a number of skilled PHP, Ruby-On-Rails and CakePHP programmers and a number of them are pretty skilled developers. Already a number of Singapore-developed applications are making their mark on the social networks, and it’ll be interesting to see what comes up next.

If you’ve spoken to me or exchanged emails, you’ll know that I’m a pragmatist at heart. Having see the rise of the dotcoms and dot-crashes soon after, I’m certainly not in this application if the end result of facebook monetization is mere “hype”.

Talking to Jason Bailey, whom I’m helping to launch his $uperRewards FB monetization system, I’ve seen the applications and case studies of successful FB applications which are making $100,000 – $200,000 a month.

These applications are probably in the top 5% of Facebook applications that turn a profit and a huge profit at that…and the reality of any capitalist society is that you must benchmark yourself against benchmark yourself against the leaders, rather than the other 90% of Facebook developers who are merely scrambling to find two nickels to rub together…

A business must be able to generate positive cashflow and must be able to sustain a comfortable lifestyle for the application creators. Anything less and you’re running a charity.

Let’s break this down for a moment…

An “average” application might generate $10,000 to $15,000 a month, which could be fairly reasonable…until you break that $15,000 by 30 days, or $500 a day.

$15,000 a month or $500 a day, with an assumption of 50,000 daily active users means you are generating 1 cent per daily user…that’s pretty pathetic…

–

Instead, if you want to go big with Facebook Applications, you need to define your goal and reverse engineer the process.

I think $100,000 per month is a decent benchmark. (as a starting point…)

About Me

Hi, I’m Andrew Wee, an Asia-based internet marketer.I’ve been involved in the online world since 1997, having worked at one of Asia’s first content portals and helping to develop and project manage several content sites focused on verticals such as news, stocks, mutual funds and consumer/entertainment.Continue reading here